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      In addition to the text of the serialized novel, this book contains a brief biography of Duniway, a Preface which discusses Duniway's literary works and woman's right activities, an Afterword which describes the times in which the novel was set, an Appendix which contains the text of the National Centennial Equal Rights Protest which was printed shortly before this book was written, and a Selected Bibliography of works by and about the author. For information about this important, influential, almost forgotten 19th century woman's rights activist and suffragist, this book provides a wealth of information for both the student and scholar. The Afterword contains the best relatively short summary of the status of women in 19th century American that I have read. That alone makes this book worth purchasing and reading. The novel itself describes the processes by which several women come to understand their disabilities as women and by which they come to a feminist consciousness.

From About Duniway

1.       "As the journey [her family's overland trek from Illinois to Oregon] began, Jenny was appointed family scribe by her family, John Tucker Scott (1809-1880), and recorded the history of their migration -- made on foot, by horseback, and in an ox-drawn wagon -- in what she titled her "Journal of a Trip to Oregon." pp. vii

2.       "Abigail's farm life was full of drudgery. She labored long and hard to keep up with the never-ceasing tasks of a farm wife in an era with little mechanization. She later contended that such arduous work led many women to early graves, but somehow, in the interval in which she was preparing for Hubert's birth, she managed to find time to complete her first novel, Captain Gray's Company, or Crossing the Plains and Living in Oregon. Published in April 1859, it was the first commercially printed novel in Oregon and one of Oregon's first five literary books. It was Duniway's first fictionalized version of the Scott's 1852 migration to Oregon, though by no means her best work. Her later serialized novels are stylistically superior and so much more sophisticated, they almost seen to have come from a different pen.

         Despite the author being twenty-five at the time it was published, it would be kindest to look at Captain Gray's Company as a work of juvenilia. And yet it was a story that the author felt compelled to write, and it marks her entry into the larger world of affairs beyond that circumscribed by hearthstone and barn." p. viii

3.       "In 1865 the Duniway family moved to Albany, Oregon, where they hoped to recoup their fortunes. Abigail opened a school, but soon chose to try her hand at business instead. In 1866 she established a millinery store that "flourished reasonably well in a financial way." According to her own account, Abigail's business dealings brought her into contact with so many women suffering from the effects of unjust laws and customary degradation that she felt compelled to begin her public campaign for equal rights. In 1871 she volunteered to represent Oregon at a woman's suffrage convention in San Francisco. There she met some of the most passionate leaders of the woman's movement, and underwent a radical transformation.

         After arriving home, Duniway decided to move to Portland, Oregon, where she began her career as a publisher. By this time, her family included its final complement of six children; Wilkie Collins (1861-1927), Clyde Augustus (1866-1944), and Ralph Roelofson (1869-1920) had been born after Hubert's birth in 1859. However, motherhood did not dissuade her from establishing the New Northwest, a weekly newspaper that proclaimed on its masthood to be "devoted to the interests of humanity, independent in politics and religion, alive to all live issues and thoroughly radical in opposing and exposing the wrongs of the masses." Her career as a vocal and indomitable proponent of equal rights had begun in earnest.

         The New Northwest remained in publication until 1887. During its sixteen years, the paper's editor-in-chief rose to prominence as one of the best-known women in America. She crisscrossed the continent many times to lecture and attend woman's congresses in far-away cities, retracing quickly by railroad the route she had arduously traversed on foot and by wagon in 1852. Her fiery oratory made her a much-sought-after speaker in meetings coast-to-coast, and she served as one of the several national vice-presidents of the NWSA (National Woman Suffrage Association), headed by her close friend and admired associate, Susan B. Anthony. Duniway also spent many weeks and months on the road closer to home, traveling the Pacific Northwest (predominantly Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the states of the old Oregon Country, which she termed her "chosen bailiwick) by "river, rail, state, and buckboard," while she canvassed for the New Northwest, addressed public meetings, and raised support for women's rights." pp. ix-xi

4.       "Duniway's Westerns are more intellectual and realistic than most, providing a broader view of the many elements that constituted the new society being formed in the West -- elements that combined to make these states a haven for equal rights activists. Woman suffrage can rightly be said to be a Western institution; all of the states in which women won full voting rights in advance of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted in 1920, are located in this region. Eastern states lagged far behind. Abigail Scott Duniway's novels, which depicted the actual conditions that plagued women and suggested new courses of action that would remedy the injustices she described, were instrumental in bringing about many of the early victories in the West.

         In 1866 Duniway suffered a sharp blow when her only daughter, Clara, died from tuberculosis. At this time, Abigail had fallen out with the leaders of the woman's movement because of her protemperance, anti-prohibition stance regarding alcohol. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was a rising force, gathering support for the nationwide prohibition of alcohol (eventually leading to the passage of the Twentieth Amendment). Duniway foresaw that prohibition would be ineffectual, but, more importantly, she was keenly aware that agitation by women for prohibition would delay gaining voting rights, which had to be granted by men. Many powerful men had vested interests in alcohol-related businesses, or did not desire any infringements on their own rights to drink." pp. xi-xii

5.       "And yet, Abigail did achieve remarkable success in the tasks to which she most ardently devoted herself. By the time of her death at eighty in 1915, this Mother of Woman Suffrage in the Pacific Northwest had seen women win full voting rights in all the states of her "bailiwick" -- in Idaho (1896), in Washington (1910), and in Oregon (1912). Duniway wrote Oregon's Equal Suffrage Proclamation in her own hand at the behest of governor Oswald West, and was the first woman in the state to register to vote." p. xiii

6.       "At the time Abigail began her career, women's civil disabilities extended far beyond mere lack of the vote. The situation was terrible for those who were single, yet even crueler for married women, who had no legal existence apart from their husbands. They could not sign contracts, had no title to their own earnings, no right to property, nor any claim to their children in case of separation or divorce. From the perspective of these disadvantages, the accomplishments of leaders in the vanguard of the woman's movement -- including Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Abigail Scott Duniway -- are even more remarkable." p. xiii

From the Preface

1.       "The rediscovery of the Duniway trilogy [Edna and John (1876), Blanche LeClerq (1886), and Margaret Rudson (1896)], a major addition to the somewhat slim ranks of early Idaho literature, adds significantly to our understanding of Idaho in its formative years, particularly with respect to its importance as one of the earliest locations in which women won the right to vote." p. xv

2.       "To fully appreciate any novel originally published in serialized form, one must attempt to imagine it from the point of view of its contemporary readers. Each chapter constitutes its own mini-story. The plethora of exciting events found in successive chapters seem implausible if read one after the other, but appear more realistic when read at intervals. The advantages of building a long-standing relationship between readers and her novel and its characters worked to further Duniway's aim of raising the collective consciousness of her audience regarding the true nature of women's oppressed situation, and inciting them to action. According to Brown, when readers engaged such novels simultaneously, they "created a common culture." Forging such a bond was a necessary precondition for uniting residents of sparsely populated Idaho behind a drive for women's rights.

         "According to Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund in The Victorian Serial, reading novels chapter by chapter over a period of many months was a course that "was intertwined with a vision of life no longer shared by the dominant literary culture of the twentieth century." The medium was the message, and showed how life was a continuous process. One could see how characters were built and progressed over time, and thereby more easily imagine that such fictional changes for the better could be instituted in real life. Readers had time to become intimately acquainted with the lives of the characters in the serials they were reading, little by little, just like becoming acquainted with people in real life. They were drawn more closely into the character's joys and sorrows, much like present-day soap opera aficionados. However, because Duniway's novels are exemplary, intended to teach lessons like parables, the empathy generated in the reader was designed to induce them to action. Hughes and Lund note that at the beginning of the twentieth century a new modernist aesthetic in literature, which elevated "the whole over the part," and created "doubts about the integrity or identity of the individual," arose and supplanted the serialized form. They discuss that without the "localized framework" showing that humans are "individuals cooperating to build over time a larger whole," literature in the modernist tradition is very ineffectual at creating community, or spurring readers to action. The literary tradition that Duniway worked within was eminently suitable for her purposes.

         The modern readers will no doubt read Edna and John in a far shorter period than the original nine months of its publication. Nevertheless, to preserve a sense of the experience of its earliest readers, each chapter is headed by its publication date. Nine times, while Duniway was on her sojourn to the East, the promised installment did not arrive in Portland in time for publication, and readers' expectations were held in abeyance until the following week(s). These occasions are marked by the inclusion of the notices that appeared in the New Northwest concerning the story's absence. In addition, each chapter begins with an excerpt from the "National Equal Rights Protest," a document presented by Susan B. Anthony and others to Ulysses S. Grant, President of the United States, on July 4, 1876, at the key event of the United States Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia. This document boldly impeached the entire United States government on the grounds that the rights of "one-half the people" were ignored. It is reproduced in its entirety in the Appendix. A more detailed discussion of its relationship to the events in Edna and John, as well as a more thorough treatment of other aspects of the novel, can be found in the Afterword." pp. xxii-xxiii

From the Afterword

1.       "In 1876, as Abigail Scott Duniway began to write her eighth novel, Edna and John, the land of the free was celebrating its Centennial Anniversary amidst hoopla and pageantry. But all were not in agreement that this was truly an occasion for celebration. On July 4, that day held most sacred to the memory of liberty by national tradition, angry protesters rallied to impeach the government on the grounds that, over a decade after "negro" emancipation, "one-half the people" were still enslaved. The stories of this Centennial Protest and Edna and John are intertwined. At the time Duniway's narrative was written, single and married women alike were denied suffrage, which alone could be said to represent a form of slavery by placing all women under the political domination of men. But, with few exceptions, marriage brought an end to a woman's legal identity altogether -- a state of civil death -- a thoroughly subjugating type of enslavement. Married women had no right to property nor any legal existence apart from their husbands; the twain had been made one, and that one the male "partner" in the enterprise.

         Under English common law, the basis for American law, the woman thus blessed became a femme coverte (a female who, for legal purposes is covered, or overshadowed by her husband's presence). Married women could not sign contracts, had no title to their own earnings, no right to property (even when it was theirs by bequest), nor any claim to their children in case of separation or divorce. Because the beginnings of the woman's movement are shrouded by the suffrage issue, however, the fact that women's civil disabilities were ever this extensive is obscured. Thus, the enormity of the struggle that leaders in the vanguard of the movement undertook has not been properly appreciated.

         By 1876, due to the efforts of dedicated male and female activists, legislation had been passed in many states to begin alleviating such conditions; but the former status of most wives was little altered. The first Married Woman's Property Act was passed in 1839 in New York, and other states began to follow suit. Such laws commonly entitled women to possessions received by bequest or inheritance, or to those which were theirs before marriage. But early legislation generally did not entitle women to the proceeds of their own labor after marriage . . . or even to ownership of their own wardrobes.

         In Oregon, Duniway's first victory came in the form of a Married Woman's Sole Trader bill passed by the Senate in 1872, enabling "any woman engaged in business on her own account to register the fact in the office of the country clerk, and thereby secure her tools, furniture, or stock in trade against the liability of seizure by her husband's creditors." The rights thus gained were quite limited and contingent on a woman's registering her business. This could be problematic if the husband objected, or if a woman did not consider it important to register before marital or financial conflicts involving her husband ensued.

         Not until 1878 was a Married Woman's Property Act finally passed in Duniway's home state, allowing wives to possess real estate and other goods in their own names, keep their own wages, and manage, sell and will their own property. By 1900, after three decades of effort, Duniway could report that in Oregon "All laws have been repealed that recognize civil disabilities of the wife which are not recognized as existing against the husband, except as to voting and holding office." Voting rights would not come until 1912.

         In popular nomenclature, the leaders of the first wave of the woman's movement are referred to as "suffragists," but this designation is misleading in that it deals only with the voting issue. The struggle for woman's rights devolved merely into a campaign for the vote in the late nineteenth century, after most states had already passed legislation removing the worst of women's civil disabilities. But from the outset, movement leaders, particularly those of the radical wing of the movement to which Duniway belonged, saw the necessity of working to secure equal rights in all areas of life, e.g., the right to engage in any and all occupations, equal pay for equal work, issues surrounding the abuse of women, including marital and extra-marital rape, etc. In retrospect, it is apparent that concentrating efforts only on securing the vote, to the exclusion of other equally important concerns, falsely lulled women into believing that their goal had been accomplished with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Hence, nearly a century later, women are still hampered by many of the same lingering inequalities.

         The gross injustices perpetrated by nineteenth-century marriage laws are well illustrated in the New Northwest. Wives, a form of chattel property, had little recourse. In a blurb under "Home [Portland area] News" on April 27, 1877, Duniway's paper relates the incident of a 20-year-old woman who chose to enter "a house of ill-fame . . . to escape from the brutalities of a drunken husband. This monster, she alleges, had at one time dragged her inhumanly." Because of unjust laws, many of the most well educated and intelligent women of the age refused to marry, or hesitated to do so -- with good reason. Voting rights, in such an equation, could even be said to be a null issue. Married or unmarried, a woman could not go to the polls, but if married she couldn't even elect to retain her own rightful property or personal dignity.

         Thus was the situation in the U. S. Centennial year, 1876, when Abigail Scott Duniway began composing Edna and John." pp. 185-178

From Edna and John

1.       Edna is speaking to Aunt Judy: "I've been shocked with myself for nearly two years, good auntie. If I shock others, it is only the natural effect of a very unnatural cause. I tell you, auntie, that woman's degraded, helpless position is the weak point in our so-called free institutions to-day. It is a disturbing force everywhere, causing unequal, incompatible marriages, severing family ties, driving men and women to insanity, filling the world with paupers, criminals, drunkards, idiots, prostitutes, and monstrosities, and crowding our homes with disease and death!" p. 75

2.       " "O, my God! The God of the destitute and desperate, is there not in all America a Canada for fugitive wives?" she [Edna] wailed at length, while Mrs. Rutherford wept in helpless agony." " p. 165

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by Mrs. A. J. Duniway, in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington City.

Woman's degraded, helpless position is the weak point of our institutions today -- a disturbing force everywhere, severing family ties, filling our asylums with the deaf, the dumb, the blind, our prisons with criminals, our cities with drunkenness and prostitution, our homes with disease and death. -- National Centennial Equal Rights Protest

      There was mourning in the home of Solon and Susan Rutherford -- mourning that far exceeded the great grief that had wrung the hearts of the husband and wife fifteen years before, when three-year-old baby Ethel, twin companion to the now grown and married Edna Rutherford, had closed her blue eyes beneath the shadows of the great maples and folded her tiny hands under the mysterious influence of the death-sleep.

      "I thought my heart was broken when Ethel was taken," said the sorrowing mother; "but I had the comforting assurance that God took her, and that, somewhere in the illimitable vastness of the filmy hereafter, she would blossom into a more perfect angelhood than could be reached in the earth-life. So I trusted in the Lord and was comforted. But now --"

      Great sobs choked her further utterance, and she leaned languidly upon the sofa pillow -- the pillow that Edna had so often shaken up and arranged for the comfort of her aching head -- and the blessed tears fell like summer rain.

      Solon Rutherford was stupefied with an overpowering loneliness. Seven children had been born to the household, of whom four sons had grown to manhood and settled themselves upon farms adjacent to their parents in the valley of the Missouri. The eldest child was a daughter who had married young, and had also always lived, since marriage, in the neighborhood adjacent to the old homestead. The early ambition of this daughter's parents, who had marked out for her -- as what young parents have not -- a career of brilliancy, having its root in a fortunate matrimonial alliance, had so long been thwarted that their fond anticipations in relation to her were well nigh forgotten. Not but that the eldest born had married reasonably well; her husband, plain, unpretending Thomas Jones, having proved a plodding, well-to-do farmer, who looked upon a wife as something handy to have in the house, and as being his own, by law and gospel, without any sentiment of love or any sense of obligation to cherish and protect her further than to keep her in good working order through the busiest seasons; so her father and mother had long ago laid away their early parental dream, but had cherished a new and intensified longing for Edna's matrimonial success -- a longing which had spared them neither pains nor expense in providing her with many accomplishments.

      Four years at a fashionable school for young ladies had "finished" Edna's education. At least, as was very unusual in the great West among farmer's daughters at the time of which our story opens, she could play superbly, sing divinely, and talk like an educated parrot or an animated dictionary. If she had learned aught of the practical lessons of life at school, her mother had failed to discover it; if she had imbibed knowledge combined with understanding, relative to the duties of wivehood, motherhood, and above all, of womanhood, nobody was able to discern her progress; but she was pretty, witty, and brilliant, and had emerged from school thoroughly imbued with the ideal extravagances respecting the divinity of the other sex, which are the bane of all pupils in any one-sexed school. Why parents will not see the folly of bringing up their children in schools wherein the sexes are to live together in the most intimate relations ever afterward, is one of the anomalies of human inconsistency, which, while deprecating its existence, we will not here attempt to account for.

      For a brief season after Edna's return from school she had reigned in the rustic vicinity in which she had been cradled as a star of the first magnitude. True, the young ladies disliked her, and their mammas unanimously dubbed her "a forward minx," but she was queen of hearts among the gentlemen, and swayed her scepter with a royal hand. Why she had fancied John Smith, nobody could imagine. She had had scores of other suitors, far better looking than he, and certainly quite as intellectual; but Cupid is a capricious marksman, and there is little certainty in the aim of his arrows.

      It was enough for Edna that her parents disliked him. While in boarding school she had slyly read many a novel wherein the heroine had figured as much-persecuted maiden, and the lover as a noble-hearted suitor, and a perfect Adonis in form and feature, with whom, after much tribulation, the enraptured girl had escaped through a window, in a single suit of cheap attire, to be ever after shielded, protected, loved, cherished and provided for, as none but wives and mothers are.

      Nobody else could see anything prepossessing about John Smith. Solon Rutherford fancied that the name, of itself, was sufficient to satisfy any woman with common sense, without accepting the man that bore it as an additional encumbrance, but there is no accounting for taste. The name of Smith was grand enough, if only the man who bore it possessed sufficient moral, mental, and physical stamina to make it honored and respected.

      Their courtship had been carried on mostly by letter.

      Edna Rutherford was a girl for whom nature had fully done her share. Possessed of more than ordinary physical beauty, of neither the brunette type nor blonde, you would not have thought, to look at her, that she was in any degree capable of emotions, much less would you have supposed that an irresistible, impetuous will held a fiery temper constantly in abeyance, and dominated over the will of her associates in all things. But appearances are often deceiving, and Edna's was no unusual exception. It was against the rules of the seminary where she was utterly unfitted for the self-abnegation of ordinary wifehood for the young ladies to associate in any manner with gentlemen.

      They were often deprived for months together of all associations with the opposite sex, except that which was necessarily accorded them by the squeaky-voiced president and his spindle-shanked assistant, who parted their hair in the middle and acted the constant spy over the "proprieties," so the girls hated them while they learned and harbored extravagant admiration of other men in an accelerated ratio, which might have been, and doubtless was, duly reprehensible, but it was none the less ardent on that account. Contraband love letters regularly found their clandestine way to a ledge in the great stone wall beside the iron gate, where sundry romantic young gentlemen readily exchanged them for their own garden fancies; and Edna Rutherford was through this medium rendered desperately in love with John Smith before she was at all acquainted with him in any other way; and from the vows thus plighted she was far too conscientious to recede.

      She had never met her adored but once before leaving school, and then but for a moment, and the interview had been a stolen one, under the lee of the great wall, where the dark shadows cast by the moonlight had heightened his beauty and magnified his diminutive proportions.

      How their correspondence began, she never could exactly remember; but the arrangement had been brought about by a mischief-loving sprite who was the pedagogue's favorite, and who, consequently, had her own way in all things.

      Edna distinctly recollected that John had for an instant pressed her hand in the shadows; that he had begged permission to marry her, and that her ready assent had been followed by a hasty and passionate embrace, accompanied by a few thrilling words of endearment, sealed by a kiss, which let all other memories fade, and would ever be to her the most sacred experience in her store-house of retrospection.

      From that day Edna Rutherford had considered herself, before God, as engaged. Her red lips became fully ripe under the inspiration of love, her chest expanded, her eyes grew strangely luminous, and her mind passing clear.

      John Smith's letters were models of propriety, intensity, sentiment, eloquence and poetry.

      Well had it been for Edna could she have known that they were copied bodily from a model guide to love-letter writing, which the pale youth in whom her existence was becoming absorbed had learned to imitate, even in punctuation and paragraphing. But Edna knew nothing of the world, and cooped as she was behind the high walls of a stately edifice devoted to making fashionable fools of women, how was she to know anything about men?

      On commencement day (why so named is another human anomaly), when Edna's school days were ended, and she stood before the world ready to pronounce her valedictory in a trembling, fluttering voice (and why she should be expected to do such a thing, when ever after she was to consider public speaking unladylike, was another fashionable anomaly), and she stood, as we have said, before an expectant public, to make the last speech ever expected by the aforesaid public from a full-fledged woman, John Smith sent her a bouquet, and her glad heart was filled with a blissful state of quiet exultation, not unmixed with sincere sympathy for the other graduating girls, not one of whom, to her certain knowledge, was yet "engaged.

      If she sometimes wished that John's surname had been "Rutherford" and her own maiden synonym "Smith," that the marriage rite might thereby fix upon the new alliance a more pretentious cognomen, she choked back the aspiration, and whispered the objectionable "Smith" to herself so often that she gradually grew accustomed to it, though, in truth, she was always a little ashamed of the title because it was "so common." "De Smythe" would have suited her exactly; and she made many secret resolves concerning special acts of possible legislatures, wherein the name might be legally altered to suit her fastidious imaginings.

      School was over, and she was not only of age, but 'engaged," blessed thought, and John's bouquet was in her hand and his billet doux in her bosom. Her father and mother were foolishly proud of her, as though every daughter in the land who thus graduates isn't a paragon; and when John Smith formally proposed for Edna's hand in marriage, doing up his proposition in another faultless letter, copied verbatim from the same "guide" that had aided him in winning his bride -- to be -- and Edna's father fumed and swore, and Edna's mother wept and scolded, the work was done; for hadn't all the cruel parents of whom she had ever read, in the stolen novels upon which school-girls feed, treated their persecuted daughters just so? And could any girl in the land become the subject and object of ecstatic bliss, in the ever rapturous marriage relation, unless she would break away from parental restraints and step right out into marriage and freedom?

      So reasoned Edna Rutherford, and upon this reasoning she hastily acted, thereby beginning our story, good reader, just where every other story ends. It was idle to say she thus renounced her home and its old associations without regret. True, her four years' alienation from home life, during the period of probation spent at school, had so far weaned her from her mother that she had been robbed of the most necessary teachings of a daughter's experience; and the mother-love which should have crowned her womanhood with a halo of abiding glory- was to her a shadowy myth, an intangible dream of olden memories, scarcely ever recalled, and never prized as it should have been.

      "It's useless for us to fret, wife," said philosophic Solon Rutherford. "Edna's made her bed, and if it proves a couch of nettles, she it is must lie upon it. I've discharged my duty."

      "God knows I've tried to discharge mine," was the heart-broken response; "but I can't find any consolation in the reflection that her bed of nettles is of her own choosing. I wish we hadn't sent her away to school. I wish she had always remained where I might have watched and tended and loved her. Then I'm sure she wouldn't have been disobedient. Solon, do you have any idea of their intentions?"

      "In what way, mother?"

      "I mean, where do you think they'll go and what do you think they'll do?"

      "I don't know, and I don't care! I wash my hands of further responsibility in the premises," said the indignant gather.

      "But I care, Solon," was the sad reply; "and if I had my way, I'd give them a start in life and a parental blessing and let them go."

      And make a fool of yourself, dear."

      "And make a mother of myself, you'd better say. Solon, do you see these worn hands? I've toiled and suffered for you for forty years without recompense. Mainly off of the fruit of these hands you have grown rich. I have never been a burden to you in any way. Even the doctor bills that my periodic confinements have incurred have been paid by my own toil, and now I have a request to make. You won't be angry, dear?"

      The voice of Mrs. Rutherford trembled and her whole frame quivered with ill-suppressed expectancy.

      "What the mischief do you mean, Susan?" said her husband, in an injured tone. "One would think, to hear you talk, that I had been a very tyrant, exacting from you such constant sacrifices as would shame a Blue Beard. I'm astonished at you."

      The eyes of the bereaved mother were filled afresh with tears.

      "I thought," she said, diffidently, "that I might have control of a thousand dollars or so, that I'd like to make Edna a present and help her on in life."

      "Woman! do you think I'm made of money, that I could give you a thousand dollars to throw away on that disobedient hussy -- "

      "Stop, Solon!" pleaded the wife. "She was my baby, and all I had left. I can't bear to hear you call her names."

      "Whether she was all you had or not, you haven't got her now," replied the father. "You know I threw away thousands upon her education. Much good it'll do her! She'll spend her life at the cradle, cook-stove, and washtub. Better have kept her in the kitchen all her life."

      "I objected to a boarding-school education, as you know, Solon; but you had it your way, and this is what's come of it. There is no kind of sense in our being unreasonable. All our obstinacy will only make the matter worse. Let me draw a thousand from the bank. I've earned it, Solon. I'd get it as my dower if you should die. Please, dear."

      But Solon Rutherford was not to be mollified. The idea that any inherent, inalienable property right was vested in his wife, the mother of his children, and for nearly half a century the uncomplaining servant of his needs, desires, passions, and caprices, had never for an instant found lodging in his brain. And now, when he was smarting under the lash of bereavement and the double sting of wounded pride, for this silent partner in his great possessions to demand a fraction of the patrimony which he had always considered entirely his own, was but adding insult to his injured dignity.

      "They may go their way for all o' me!" he said, decidedly. "I wish the puny, soft-headed popinjay all the joy he'll find in his new possessions."

      Mrs. Rutherford saw that further entreaty and remonstrance were alike useless. There was no law in all this land of free men to compel any one of the law-makers to give to any bond-woman "of the fruit of her hands," and thereby fulfill the Scriptural injunction to "let her own works praise her in the gates," so the mother of rash Edna Rutherford took up again her daily duties, crushed back the longings of her soul, and hid away her deep sorrow behind butter firkins and wash-tubs, while her bereaved lord and master jogged leisurely over the neighboring highways behind a gentle roadster, and daily sought to soothe his ruffled senses with the perfumes of an old-fashioned pipe.

      John Smith had married Edna Rutherford under the implicit belief that her parents would in a very little while so far relent as to give them a fine setting up in the world; but it took a very few days of wedded waiting to convince him that for once he had reckoned without his host.

      The honeymoon was spent at a fashionable hotel in the same aristocratic town in which Edna had attended school, and for a brief period, until John's very light exchequer was exhausted, the couple were the admiration of the inmates of the school, who envied Edna, and thenceforth laid many additional snares wherewith to entrap unsuspecting swains into the meshes of promissory matrimony.

      The third week of conjugal bliss was over, and John could not pay the accruing board bill. This was Edna's first great humiliation. She had learned from her stand-point of inexperience to look upon marriage as the open road to plenty of spending money, though what reason she had for this expectation she could not have told. Certainly, if she had looked at home, she would have discovered the very opposite fact, but who ever knew a modern-educated girl of eighteen endowed with a modicum of practical business sense?

      Edna pawned her wedding ring to pay the offending bill, laying many injunctions of secrecy upon the old man who carried on a second-hand brokerage behind a sign of three gold balls -- injunctions which were industriously disobeyed as soon as redemption day came and brought no owner to reclaim the property.

      John Smith was happy as the day. He had never learned to struggle for a livelihood, the moderate monthly allowance from an estate of great expectations having thus far sufficed for his own needs and luxuries, though lamentably inadequate for the maintenance of two. The possession of a wife as well connected as was Edna Rutherford was glory enough for him. He could not see that she had any further use for the wedding ring now the marriage was consummated, and his indifference to their financial wants aroused a feeling of indignation in Edna, that ere the honeymoon was over had settled into the barest toleration of his presence.

      But something had to be done. Some change must be made in their mode of life, and what that change could be, or would be, was an anxious problem to Edna, and after a while became a matter of decided interest to John.

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